Shalom!

We are delighted to welcome you to The Sydney Taylor Shmooze. We couldn’t be more excited to be starting this blog and to have you as a part of it.

Here at the Shmooze, we’ve been following mock award blogs such as Heavy Medal and Calling Caldecott from their infancy. It feels amazing to join the club at last and talk about our favorite topic, Jewish children’s books.

Book awards are tricky things. Sometime the most buzzed about books lose. Sometimes obscure books win. Awards are incredibly challenging to predict, no matter how many award committees you’ve been on in the past. Sometimes it’s hard to guess the final result even when you’re in the room.

The fun of mock award blogs is they allow for thoughtful discussion of many more titles than those few that will make the final list. They let us think about the criteria, explore the books and find things we didn’t see at first.

In the end, it’s okay if we don’t guess the winner. What will matter is being able to share so many wonderful books with all of you.